Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin is the language of instruction of China and Taiwan. Mandarin is  one of five major regional languages of China. It spreads wider than any other regional language, from the whole northern part of China down to Yunnan Province in the southwest corner of China. In that big area there are many regional differences in vocabulary, so somebody who moves from Beijing to Yunnan could not understand people there who were speaking their own language, Yunnan hua. The problem is bigger than for a person in Great Britain or the United States to go to Australia. Therefore, starting in the 1920s, the Chinese government set up a national language based on the most widely understood words and pronunciations. Mandarin is a standard language. It is nobody's native language, but a good average between various language forms and a common language everyone can understand and communicate with. It is based on the Beijing dialect but it is not the same as Beijing dialect. In China, the language used in all schools is known as Standard Mandarin, Pu Tong Hua 普通话/普通話 meaning "common (spoken) language" or Han Yu 汉语/漢語 meaning "language of the Han. In places such as Malaysia it is known as Huayu. In Taiwan it is known as Guo Yu 国语/國語 meaning "national language." There are some minor differences in these standards. Mandarin is spoken by over 800 million people around the world, more than any other language. Standard Mandarin is one of the six official languages at the United Nations.

Writing
Mandarin is written with Chinese characters called Hàn zì (漢字 or 汉字). Each Hànzì has its own pronunciation and meaning. An ordinary dictionary will contain about 10,000 characters. Spoken Mandarin uses very many compound words, words that combine meanings the way English does in such terms as "machine gun," "fire truck," "playground," etc. The Hanzi are ideograms: one character means one idea. The various concepts are derived from the ideograms by combining them. Mandarin can be also written phonetically (that is: written as it is spoken) with Latin alphabet as you really cannot see the spelling from Hanzi characters. That is called translitteration. The most popular translitteration system is called Pinyin.